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Sand Hill: Q&A with Noah Harlan on Challenges in the Internet of Things in 2016

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Editor’s note: Noah Harlan is president of the AllSeen Alliance, a leading cross-industry consortium to advance the Internet of Things (IoT) through AllJoyn, a unified open source development framework. He is also a co-founder of Two Bulls, which developed an IoT platform used by Qualcomm, called Higgns. Two Bulls was selected for the launch of AWS’ IoT service as a designated systems integrator. Two Bulls is a boutique digital product solutions company specializing in mobile and IoT and the infrastructure that supports them; Higgns is an interoperable configuration platform for IoT products and services. I spoke with Noah about the IoT’s progress and where he thinks the IoT is headed in 2016.

What do you think are the biggest challenges that businesses have as far as moving forward in the IoT? Is it interoperability?

Noah Harlan: Interoperability is really all going to come down to the adoption of frameworks. Right now, there is actually a big fight that’s starting to occur among different formats and people are staking out different perspectives on it.

You have high lock-in systems, either fully propriety ecosystems that are made by a manufacturer such as Apple (as in the case of Apple HomeKit, which is mostly a home-use scenario). Or you have some semi-open things that are on the horizon with Google’s Brillo and Weave, which I presume will involve Android integration. Brillo is the operating system and Weave is the framework.

And you have some open source alternatives. Currently AllJoyn is the only one that’s actually shipping production code and has a certification system.